


Squadron Leader Collins and the Two Bottoms

by disenchanted, Lilliburlero



Category: Dunkirk (2017), The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Anglo-Scots Relations, Class Difference, Crossover, Established Relationship, M/M, Open Relationships, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-War, Scotland, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 18:03:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13664358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: An everyday tale of the Common Riding, and common riding.





	Squadron Leader Collins and the Two Bottoms

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a spinoff from [‘Scenes from The Short and Crowded Life of Jon Marlow’](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12018027/chapters/27200034), but can be read as a standalone. For readers unfamiliar with Antonia Forest’s Marlows books, all you really have to know for the purposes of this story is that Jon Marlow attained the (slightly implausible, but everyone over-promotes their faves) rank of Group Captain during the war, is a farmer and falconer, bad with money and paperwork, and has a close friendship with his thirteen-year-old neighbour Patrick Merrick, who helps him look after his hawks. 
> 
> The Langholm Common Riding originated in 18th-century land disputes and became, over the years, a decidedly eccentric Borders festival. [Here’s](http://www.dumfriesandgalloway.hss.ed.ac.uk/description-of-what-happens-at-the-langholm-common-riding/) a description from a former Cornet, Billy Young, and some footage from the approximate period we’re writing about here.

Collins flung down his kitbag and looked around. There wasn’t much to see, and though he had never been here before, nothing that was new to him. The layout of a but and ben did not admit much variation, and this one, down to the placement of the wooden trough that served as a sink and the black-leaded range, was in layout as nearly identical to his grandmother’s as it was its inverse in cleanliness.

The floor was unadorned stone flags, set directly in the earth: even in the last week of July a chill rose from them. A padded bench curved around the corner of the neuk, and opposite stood the patriarch’s seat of honour, a wing chair caked with grease along the top and arms. The furniture was completed by a deal table, three stools, and a dresser meant for the proud display of a wifie’s best delft, but which in this case held a ball of string, two empty Bass bottles, a tin mug with a small hole in the bottom, one and fourpence ha’penny in loose change, some sheets of the _Eskdale & Liddlesdale Advertiser_ with fishing flies laid out on them, and a toffee tin containing four India tags, a fairly decent trilobite fossil and a lump of seaglass. The effort of removing the rusted lid (depicting a Highlander, plaid over his shoulder, kneeling to receive Bonnie Prince Charlie with a kiss to his hand) reminded him that he had forgotten, on his anonymous way from Waterloo to Euston, to buy Vaseline. He didn’t quite like the thought of asking Mrs Murray the chemist, who had supplied milk of magnesia and linctus for his earliest shites and snochters, for even as innocently versatile a preparation as petroleum jelly.

He was pure daft. What had possessed him, to have the two of them meet here, where you couldn’t spit without hitting kin of his: not just Collinses, who were numerous enough, but Grieves and Grahams and Armstrongs. He hadn’t meant to do it. One May evening in the Lord Harry Jon had started up with an antediluvian agricultural boundary grievance, and lulled by the familiarity of the subject-matter as he was amused by its translation into the accents of southern privilege, he had said something about the Common Riding, thereby activating the bye-law of the universe that states that for every mention of the Common Riding to a non-Borderer, there must be an entirely hollow invitation issued to view same. He’d returned to quarters to find a letter from Mother, full of Andrew’s triumph in the Cornet election, and from then on the thing assumed the cascade inevitability of farce: he could not miss the proudest moment of his wee brother’s life, cocked up on horseback, decked out in the colours of that year’s Derby winner (why? no-one knew) bearing the Standard before the whole Muckle Toun; he couldn’t pretend he was not due the leave; having invited Jon, he could not disinvite him; having invited Jon, he must acknowledge Geoff’s earlier and superior claims on him; Geoff wrote saying he would be delighted, and as it happened, his old friend Ben Keith (in fact, Keith’s schoolmistress sister) had recently inherited a cottage in Eskdale, place called Ewes, don’t suppose it’s anywhere near? Collins actually considered a dissimulation that could be exploded by a glance at a map, before admitting it was four miles up the Hawick road. Mother was grateful to have the spare room back, to put up another visiting Armstrong, Grieve or Graham, and it would spare his friends the ruinous cost of the Eskdale Hotel over Common Riding weekend, would it no? No-one made a saving excuse or refusal at any point, and he thought he might have relied on silaging or hay-making. But Jon Marlow and Geoff Farrier were both that thing slightly remote from his ken, gentlemen farmers with weekends to spare. They were both, he thought shamefacedly, a lot of the same things.

He lit a cigarette and drew on it hard, then went to inspect ben. It was dominated, almost filled, by a warped, blackened oak boun-bed with the shutters ripped off, clearly an import from a much bigger house. He was surprised to see that the mattress, though six inches too narrow and a foot too short, was sprung and no more than about ten years old, which probably limited the rites of passage that had occurred upon it to a death or two. He sat on it and bounced, raising something that was less dust than _spores_. He coughed and waved his cigarette as a feeble fumigant. Two camp beds were crammed between the bed and the linen press, each with a buckshee Army bed pack dumped on it. It wasn’t possible, he thought, panic-stricken. There wasn’t room for the three of them.

Collins looked around and laughed aloud. His father had been born in such a house, in a bed far humbler, sixth child (second son) of the eight that had survived infancy. Supported by his sisters in the mills, he’d left it each morning to walk an hour and half to school, in due course to cycle twenty minutes to a junior reporter’s job on the _Advertiser_ and finally into the arms of the postmistress, twenty years his senior, who’d urged him from raffish journalism to a respectable situation in the bank, before dying of breast cancer not two years into their marriage. From clerk the young widower had risen to assistant manager, gone to the war of which he never spoke, returned to become branch manager, married again, fathered two bonny boys and a wee lassie, bought a douce new villa on Waterside and oh hell, it was no fucking good. That was different, this was different, everything was different, and there was no fucking room.

He was overwhelmed by a frankly unanticipated nostalgia for the inconveniences particular to the Farrier family pile, where he was obliged to wait until midnight to creep down the corridor to Geoff’s boyhood bedroom and, because the decrepit bed-frame rattled against the wall, fuck him over the writing-desk in the sort of strict silence that only made one aware of all the strange and varied noises the human body makes during sex. There was something to be said for the view of Geoff’s shoulders—thinner than they had been before the five years on half-portions of Wehrmacht garrison rations, but Geoff’s nonetheless—barely visible in the moonlight, patterned by the shadows of the window’s lattice.

The cottage in which Jon resided was on the whole a better environment for the sort of vigorous, experimental fucking that Collins (when he was sober enough) was given to, but this was complicated by the fact that it stood on the grounds of the Marlow estate proper, which, having been requisitioned in ‘41, had still not been given up by the War Office. Tasked by the Station Commander at Rushton with overseeing the transfer of a few dozen gliders from the RAF to the AAC, Collins had spent several afternoons there, sitting in a green-walled office that by the bars on the windows he could tell had once been the nursery; he had stared through the bars and tried to reconcile himself to the knowledge that by approximately 18h15 he would be bent over a man who had had his nappies changed in that very room.

Collins still would have rather Jon and Geoff met there. To meet on his own land would have appealed to Jon’s vanity, Geoff would have been all right so long as Collins was there, and if anything went wrong there would have been the Lord Harry in Compton Marshall. Oh damn his hubris, damn the Common Riding, damn Andrew and damn Baldy bloody Beattie—

His cigarette had gone out. He dropped it and fell back onto the bed, covering his face with his hands.

 

* * *

 

In order to decrease the chances that he might meet someone he knew (kin perhaps, but it was worse to imagine one of his old schoolmates, who to Collins always seemed aged twelve despite the paunches and thinning hair, and just as likely as they were at that age to duck him in the Esk and leave him to do his best ‘Byron swimming the Hellespont’), Collins appeared at the railway station a good ten minutes after Jon’s train was due. He found Jon stood in front of the station house, kitbag slung insouciantly over his shoulder, doing his best imitation of a man who was perfectly capable of holding his own amongst a flood of provincial Scots. Jon was betrayed, however, by his obvious relief at having spotted Collins.

It was the first time Jon had looked so eager for Collins’ company outwith those of their meetings that were initiated by a rushed, low-voiced telephone call. Possibly Collins had been conditioned by their usual process to respond to that sort of eager look with a sporting randiness, because he wondered for a second whether they couldn't sneak away for a quick one before the next train came in. Then he chastised himself, thinking, in Geoff’s most self-righteous voice, ‘Poor form rather.’

Their greeting was a gesture of extravagant normality that only queers would have seen the humour in: there was a teeth-rattling handshake and a tensely forceful half-embrace, Collins flinging his arm around Jon’s free shoulder and smacking his back hard enough to make Jon jolt.

‘It really is beautiful country.’ Jon said this with the bemused admiration of a circa-1875 Regular Army type speaking of the far-flung reaches of the Empire, the implication being that though of course it wasn't Dorset, all the same it was a very fine place to be, for the time being.

Collins said, with a derision that he hadn't intended but that seemed to provoke in Jon a randiness less sporting than flustered, ‘We’ll organise a walking-party for Saturday. Right now we're going for a drink.’

It was testament to his desperation to be drunk that this was the order of the day, because the only place in Langholm where anything other than beer could be got was the bar of the Eskdale Hotel. There were two things the matter with this. The first was that Jon and Collins’ last shared experience of a hotel bar had occurred at the York Royal Station Hotel, at the level of inebriation at which you go on drinking as if it were water, somehow believing that you had reached your body’s natural limit and could not get any drunker. When Collins had gone for a slash he found himself vomiting abruptly into the urinal trough, necessitating that he rinse what had once been carrot soup (good for the eyesight!) from his boots before swaying back into the bar, finishing his pint, and giving Jon what he meant as the Look but which Jon interpreted as possible evidence of a stroke. Once Jon had been reassured that Collins’ face always did that, they went up to their twin room and made a go of it. To Collins’ recollection it had been twenty minutes of Jon clinging to him and slurring loudly all the ways he wanted to be fucked, followed by his obliterating sulk that almost none of it was at that precise moment physically possible. But that was ‘43; it had all been different then. The second thing, thought Collins, hoping he hadn’t been making faces, was that here there was absolutely no question of whether they would happen across someone he knew.

Collins had just returned to their table, carrying four whiskies and a jug of water in his arms, when it happened; he glimpsed a face in the crowd he thought he recognised and made the mortal mistake of looking up. And there it was, neither kin nor schoolmate but someone much worse: a mate of Andrew’s.

Like Andrew, Bruce Prentice had enlisted in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in ‘41, directly he was old enough; the people of Langholm had regarded this with much less suspicion than they had Collins’ decision to join the Air Defence Cadet Corps in ‘38. Bruce and Andrew were lucky enough to have missed Dunkirk, but fortune caught up to them later in the war: in ‘43 the Borderers were sent to the Pacific, where they suffered as much from malaria and dengue as from the fighting. While Andrew had done well for himself after being demobbed, Bruce had never entirely acclimated to civilian life, and last Collins had heard of him he was still casting about for a job, which— No, thought Collins, watching in dumb terror as Bruce approached; oh no, no the noo, no in front of Jon. But he did.

Prentice jutted his long, narrow jaw. He looked like the caricature Scotsman in a seaside postcard, except meaner. ‘I’ll spare you the platitudes about how unco proud you must be.’ His face was all frumplt. He was pished. Or maybe, terrifyingly, he wisnae.

‘Weel, good day to you too, Bruce. Aye, we’re hoping the guid weather hauds for the morrow.' Mildly abashed at how easily he had, at the first hint of hostility, adopted an ingratiating vernacular, Collins felt Jon shift on the bench beside him and make a minute cud-chewing sound. For a second he thought Jon shared his embarrassment at his abrupt shift out of the standard dialect, which was bad enough, but then he realised it was much, much worse than that—it was eh, fucking, hingmie— _Pavlovian_ : the bell rings, and the dog slabbers.

‘Where do you stay the noo?’ Prentice addressed Collins but his eyes flickered, sidelong, to Jon. Even in a hotel bar full of people from out of town, Jon did look foreign, somehow. But they all had roots here, roots back to the Reivers: fully three-quarters of them were probably called Armstrong or Scott. Maybe it was just the way he held himself, a slight languor that denoted the governing class of Empire, not its engineering and medical division. Collins remembered the jocular parlour game evolved by USAAF personnel at Alconbury: _fag, or just English?_ It had amused him that they played it unselfconsciously in front of him, assuming that as a Scot he shared their view of the pansy English, for the value of _amused_ that really meant _scunnert_. He had to take this one in hand.

‘Dorset. I’m stationed at RAF Rushton. Which—Bruce Prentice—Jon Marlow, friend of mine from down there. Bruce—was in Andrew’s form at school.’

Jon half-rose to offer his hand. Prentice looked at it deliberately before shaking; Jon’s pleasant demeanour evaporated like spittle on a hot girdle; you could almost hear it hiss away.

‘So you’re in the RAF as well, are you?’

‘Not now, no.’ Collins flinched at the vowels, which seemed impossibly contorted in their new setting, and the penetrating quality of the voice. No heads turned. ‘Neut neow, nuh. Booted onto Civvy Street lahst yah. Awl faw the best. It hed gawt to a point wuh it was flahn a desk, y’kneow. Couldn’t stend the bumf, end Ay was cawespowndingly heupless et it. Thah Airships wuh gled to see the beck of me.’

Collins took a choking gulp of whisky. Prentice had been demobbed a Corporal; Jon had just unthinkingly (or was it?) revealed himself someone who attracted the notice of men north of the rank of Air Commodore, or who wanted to let on he did.

‘Oh, really,’ Prentice said flatly, ‘so what do you do now?’

‘Nuthin, rilly. Waiting ahrand f’the Waw Orfice to give me beck m’hahse. Requisitioned, y’kneow. Commarndo Training. Ay suppose you mayht say Ay fahrm.’

‘You’re a long way from Dorset to be making hay.’

Jon laughed insincerely. To Collins’ ear it sounded ringingly camp on top of everything else, but if there was anything to be thankful for in Prentice’s simmering national and class resentment, it was probably that it made him deaf to _that_. ‘Eugh, yeuh. Ver’ gud. Mey manager’s en ebsol-yoot brick.’

Collins realised he had finished his first dram and reached for the water jug. Jon had to be playing it up. There _were_ worse places to pick a fight with a truculent Scots separatist than Langholm on the eve of the Common Riding, but they were probably all in Leith or the Gorbals.

‘Your manager,’ Prentice said. It was neither question nor statement, but something between: did that make it a threat?

‘How’s your ma getting on, Bruce?’ Collins said brightly and desperately. ‘Has she settled in with Jeannie?’

‘She’s back in the flat with me. Being so far out of the town didn’t suit her.’ Prentice’s married sister lived in a semi-detached on Charlotte Street, less prestigious than Waterside, where Collins’ parents had their villa, but aspiring. It was less than a mile from where they sat now. ‘Folk round there are so high and heelie, they’d hardly look at you. They seemed like foreigners, she said.’

Jon had kept his eyes on Prentice’s face. Now he rolled them to one side, looking just slightly over and past him, as he did at that shite-mad goshawk of his when she flung herself off his fist or the block, and dangled squawking. Collins tried to imagine what it would be like to be a human being on the receiving end of such infinite yet infinitesimal condescension, and came away with an unexpected appreciation of Prentice’s self-control. If Jon had looked at him like that, he probably would have lamped him—but he had other ways to chasten Jon Marlow, none of them chaste.

‘Ay cen quahte see thet,’ Jon said. ‘Oney bin heah hawf en aah, end Ay heven’t hed the wawmest of welcomes m’self.’

Collins felt queasy and exhausted, as if the adrenaline of a close shave had worn off, except there had been no high to precede it. Was this what he’d survived for—survived baling out off the coast of Margate and floating for three hours in his deflating Mae West; survived crashing upside-down in a wheat field near Rye and hanging in his cockpit, blood pooling in his head, till the farmer arrived to cut him out of his stuck Sutton harness; survived a burst of fire from a 109 that holed his kite and pierced the left earpiece of his helmet, half an inch from his skull? So that he could sit here with the English gentleman farmer whom he had started fucking mostly because he couldn’t get quite enough of the English gentleman farmer he liked fucking best, but also for other reasons even murkier, such as the fact that if you’d grown up with the knowledge that everything outside the town bounds for miles around was the property of the Duke of Buccleuch, buggering a landowner, any landowner, seemed both thrillingly transgressive and quite the right and proper thing to do; so that he could sit here in the Eskdale Temperance Hotel—he wondered, inconsequentially, what had made him think the name of his early boyhood, when the place had had a licensed bar since before the war—feebly enduring the feeble sniping of man whose shoddy, shiny demob suit was clearly the only one he possessed, whose name he only remembered because Andrew harboured some mysterious, pitying affection for him that meant the whole Collins family had to keep on rebuffing his stroppily ingratiating attempts to canvass for a clerkship in the bank…? No, he fucking hadn’t, he fucking hadn’t. He wasn’t sure why he was here, meaning both a) in Langholm with the English gentleman farmer whom he had started fucking mostly because he couldn’t get quite enough of the English gentleman farmer he liked fucking best, about to meet the English gentleman farmer he liked fucking best off the train, and b) alive.

He stood up abruptly. ‘Sorry Bruce, I’ve got to pick up another pal at the station. We’ll see you at the races the morrow, I’m sure. Knock that back, Jon.’

He thought, as they swept past him, that he heard Prentice mutter, 'Bloody brace of poofs,' but perhaps he’d imagined it, and it didn’t matter anyway.

 

* * *

 

One could write a pocket field guide, Jon thought: _The Observer Book of War Physiology_ , fully illustrated, with 16 colour plates. If you knew what to look for, Farrier was an exemplar: the physique inflated by a youth of bluff athleticism, now shrunk and slackened down to the middling proportions given him by nature, the faded hair, weathered brow and discoloured, chipped teeth, the circumspect heartiness, as if he were assessing your suitability for the escape committee that had degenerated into the world’s worst-appointed gentlemen’s club. And either German prisons had been unkind to him even by the standard, or when the war kicked off he had been, like Jon himself, an elderly outlier among boys of nineteen and twenty. He hadn’t expected that: had thought Farrier would be Collins’ age, or younger, even. But he would be fooling himself if he said he could not also see the appeal, to Iain at least: the unquiet stone-grey eyes, broad nose and Cupid’s bow lips intimated a latent pliancy that Iain had both the desire and ability to expose. In short, he reckoned Iain could fuck Farrier into even more of an abject puddle than Iain fucked him; he was envious.

‘How do you do, Marlow? Geoff Farrier.’

For half a second, all that held him upright was Farrier’s courteous, slightly over-emphatic clasp. Why hadn’t Iain _said_ something? Had he said? In ’43, in the York Royal Station Hotel, he probably had. One couldn’t very well talk about one’s boy friend being a PW without saying his Christian name. Could one? The sort of Scotch middle class that Iain came from probably could. The F/L in my section, a pal, this pal of mine, a good pal, a man I had a lot of time for, someone I became pretty close to, the man I told you about, _Farrier_. (A memory submerged for three years swam to the surface and took breath: had he really thrown his arms around Iain’s waist and sobbed _Jacek, Jacek, Jacek, please, fuck me, please, Jacek, fuck me once more, just once more, I know you can’t because you’re dead but please_ , or had it been a gin dream?)

Had Jon ever mentioned his cousin’s first name to Iain, for that matter? Perhaps he had, but why should Iain bob up and exclaim _that’s Farrier’s name too!_ in the midst of an anecdote about a fourteen-year-old Geoff Marlow running shamefully screaming from the hawkhouse, his forearm torn from elbow to wrist, and falling into Mrs Tranter’s arms, making her print frock and apron bloom blood, while the Guv’nor remarked, ‘Bligh of the Bounty ain’t in it. Rough and rude, is what he was.’

It was a common enough name, after all. That there wasn’t, to his knowledge, a Geoffrey in his own sexual history—and he didn’t really go in for utter anonymity, not like some chaps—was the merest coincidence; it wouldn’t, under any other circumstance than this, have even occurred to him. It was just something about sharing Iain, as if he were a fishing rod or an air-rifle, having Iain as a sort of hand-me-down, with and from a man called Geoff, that felt so damnably incestuous. He thought suddenly of Peter Marlowe, who was most likely dead.

He mastered his knees and said, ‘How was your journey up? Mine was lousy. Carriage was in an unbelieveable state.’

‘Had worse, I suppose.’

A little over an hour later, the patrons of the Buck having proved suspicious of Received Pronunciation to a degree that indicated the inadvisability of a second pint, they were sitting in the smaller of the Crown Inn’s two bars, beneath a framed board detailing the name and occupation of every Common Riding Cornet since 1817. Photographs and engravings of Common Ridings past covered the walls; on the bar was a small stack of handbills, replicating the poster that they’d already seen a dozen times on their walk from the station— _Races Games Town Standard To Be Borne By Mr Andrew Collins Hound Trail Voluntary Collection Kindly Lent By His Grace the Duke of Buccleuch Tradesman’s Sweepstake Consolation Race Wrestling Leaping Girls and Boys Dancing L &NER_.

Every overheard snippet of conversation buzzed with speculation about those stakes, that handicap, so many guineas. The landlord, the girl who emptied the ashtray, and a chatty character in the lavatory (alarming for his apparently total innocence) had all opened their discourse with, _Here for the Common Riding, are you?_ Jon was already bloody sick of the bloody Common Riding. Yes, he was here for the Common Riding, at least insofar as one could not very well say, _No, I’m actually here to meet the man for whom I’m sort of a convenient sexual substitute_. He did not want to be here for the Common Riding (nor the other thing, for that matter). He couldn’t care less about the Common Riding. How did these people stand it, the high point, the only point of their year, anticipated from January to July and anatomised from July to January? More than all that, though, he did not want to have any more hearty, strained conversation with Geoff Farrier, with whom he had everything in common, and all of it unspeakable: the RAF, the war, the ancestral six hundred acres that could not be sold or made to pay, _Iain Collins_.

And Iain Collins, the only person in Langholm or possibly the world who could be relied upon to mediate between these two cringing counterparts, had met Farrier at the station, discreetly caressed his hand, and explained that if he didn’t make an appearance at the Waterside villa for supper he might actually be cut out of his father’s will. The direness of this familial pressure somehow made the fact of what he was doing, leaving his boy friend and his other boy friend to get to know each other in his absence, even more socially wretched. As Iain backed away from the two of them he took on the expression of a piglet who, having been led into an abattoir, remained hopeful that it was not what it seemed.

‘You don’t suppose there’ll be pipers?’ Jon asked Farrier, exhaustedly.

‘And drummers,’ said Farrier. ‘And a brass band. One wouldn’t expect them to pitch up with a gramophone.’

There was something in his manner that implied a defensiveness on behalf of Iain’s people, which Jon thought ridiculous. But that was the price of such an intimacy as Iain and Farrier apparently had. It occurred to Jon that his repulsion might have its roots in jealousy, and discarded the thought so quickly and furiously that he realised he must have hit upon some sort of truth. That was to be examined at a later date, when it was proper to let his self-pity unfold to its full breadth; one jolly well couldn’t do it in front of someone whose repulsively intimate friendship had been bought at the price of a war spent under conditions rather worse than those Jon had endured.

It wasn’t as if Jon didn’t know the impulse. He had come, over the past months, to argue for Patrick’s enthusiasms as if they were his own: if someone, even on the wireless, referred thoughtlessly to the historical Richard III as merely Shakespeare’s villain, Jon thought instantly and indignantly of the king's good generalship, his establishment of the Council of the North, the fact that the Titulus Regius would look a deal less egregious to the medieval eye than it did today. At least Farrier was springing to a grown man’s defence, a lover’s—but was that more absurd or less? He wasn’t sure, any more. If they took an eyess, and it turned out to be a tiercel, they might call him Richard—Dickon—

Farrier was saying something. ‘—only really explicable as a survival, don’t you think, of some really very primitive instinct, of course the symbolism has been modified over the years, but the thistle and the rose-crown, like all those folksongs, you know, a marriage of masculine and feminine life-forces, in death, or—well. And the herring nailed to the barley bannock, land and sea—’

‘Hell, do they really wave those things about in the street? I half-thought Iain was having me on.’

‘Having you _on_?’ Farrier said, politely enough to give Jon a wholly unwelcome glimpse of the interior configuration of their relationship. Instead of gibing and chaffing through satirical, mobile lips, did Iain listen patiently, fondly, respectfully, as Farrier offered his views upon Human Nature and Society? Did he do it after fucking him? That was exactly what he did not want to think about, Farrier naked and pontificating, perhaps with a fag between his lips; Iain’s head on his shoulder and their legs twined together—

Farrier made a small noise of enquiry. Jon turned to see the imagined cigarette in fact dangling from his lips, such fine abundant lips in a face otherwise somewhat withered, and Farrier’s cigarette case extended to him. He took one with the awkward smile peculiar to having imagined one’s interlocutor in the nude, and offered a light in return.

‘No,’ resumed Farrier, pausing to let out the prodigious plume of smoke associated with incorrigible addicts, ‘he’s rather sentimental about it in his own way. Envious of his brother, too, I suspect; Iain wouldn’t stand a chance of being elected Cornet.’

Jon felt this to be treacherous territory: nonetheless, he was fascinated. ‘Because he’s not as good a horseman? We’ve been out once or twice, you know: he seems very steady. Not that we did anything like galloping up—what’s that street up the hill called again?’

‘Oh, it isn’t anything to do with riding. Kirk Wynd, by the way, but no; it’s political. Being Cornet really is like entering public life, and of course you would see why Iain wouldn’t stand as MP, for instance.’

Jon craned his head around to look at the board above them, thinking of Anthony Merrick, widely tipped to stand for the Conservatives in Colebridge East when the incumbent finally retired, or kicked it. There was no real reason why Sir Basil Morton Bardolph should ever retire or die, though: he was one of those hypertense, puce, brigadierish characters who effortlessly outlive much younger and fitter men. Cornets were not, as far as he could see, drawn from exactly the same social class as most MPs: _Plumber, Tanner, Pattern Weaver, Baker, Joiner_. ‘Public life? I can see you’d be a bit of a local celebrity, until the next one comes around, but surely that’s putting it high?’

Farrier said, ‘Not in Langholm.’

‘Oh, but these country towns are all much alike, aren’t they? You must be able to think of analogies in your home place.’

The slight squint, the doubtful smile, suggested that to talk at any length about his home place was just the last thing Farrier wanted. All the same he subjected himself to the discomfort of it long enough to say, ‘A Cheltenham gymkhana?’

‘Well, yes, all right. The small stakes, the vicious rivalry, the unspoken traditions, the gossip, the frightful females over the tea urns. It’s just the same. Down my way, too. Nailing a fish to a lump of cold porridge and parading a spade through the streets is just decoration—’ One of the loafing figures framing the fireplace turned a shovel-shaped face on him and Jon moderated his voice. ‘What I mean to say is we’re of it, but not part of it. Take my case. The house and farm are entailed. It should pass to my cousin when I buy it, or his son probably, because Geo—my cousin’s older. But God’s in his heaven and Attlee’s in Downing Street, and what we’ll probably do is find some way to bar the entail—I’m a duffer at paperwork, but I’m assured it can be done, anyway, what I mean is the world’s changing, already changed. And we’re better placed to navigate it than most, precisely because we’re not pegged down with wives and kids and all that sort of thing. I thought Iain felt the same. Rather glad of it than not.’

While he spoke Jon realised that the concerned slant of Farrier’s brow was becoming further slanted, and more concerned. It wasn’t the usual English disapprobation, silent yet unsubtle; it was oddly childlike, it put Jon in mind of the face Patrick made in response to him having said something that turned out to be much less pleasant than expected.

‘Look,’ said Farrier, ‘let’s have another round.’

Jon thought that this had put an end to the discussion until, with a fresh pint before him, Farrier lit another cigarette and said, ‘When I first met him I thought that that was what would hinder him as a pilot: that he isn't at all an isolationist. That he did mind about what happened on the ground.’ By the pitch of his voice Jon guessed there was more forthcoming, but there wasn't.

‘He’s certainly more functional on the ground than I ever was. The Staysh at Rushton thinks _very_ well of his logistical brain. Managed to let slip a few fairly tart reflections on my deficiencies in that department in the process. If I’d stayed on I could have become proverbial, he said, and he didn’t mean it flatteringly. But that’s not what you mean, is it?’

Farrier’s head was still bent over his pint. (You wouldn’t say his hair was _thinning_ , exactly, not just yet, Jon thought, but in a year or two you might.) He only looked up after a long period of what Jon could only assume was honest reflection.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I mean about people. He minds about people.’

Jon considered this lugubrious pronouncement. Had he ever cared about _people_? Persons, yes. Anthony Merrick (why had he come to mind first?), Jacek, naturally. Malcolm Blake, his sister Katharine. Helen Vaughan, Sarah Layton. Tom Tranter. Patrick, obviously. 

‘Why ‘“Kiltartan’s poor,” do you think?’ he asked recklessly, taking a punt on the shortish odds that Farrier was the sort of RAF officer who knew that one off by heart.

‘Because the poet couldn’t help but make his politics known, even if the airman doesn’t mind about anything.’ Farrier was smiling, though not in a way that fully cleared up the misty, suffering look. ‘Still, I like the rest so much I can quite forgive him. Funny how a chap who was well into middle-age when the war began—the last war, not ours—could manage to see it all so plainly.’

‘Yes...’ Jon tried to sound knowledgeable, but he had only the haziest idea of Yeats’s dates or his politics: he assumed the latter to be rather Fenian, though ‘Kiltartan’s poor’ sounded paternalistic, and he must have been at least on boozing terms with an RFC officer to elicit ‘lonely impulse of delight’ sort of stuff from him. He supposed Yeats drank pretty heavily: he was a poet, and Irish, after all. He half-regretted bringing it up. ‘But I think if you do understand, the—the—impulse, you do, and if you don’t, you don’t, regardless. And—’ he thought he might as well risk it, some sort of breach in Farrier’s reserve had been effected, though he was not sure exactly of what size or kind, ‘Iain’s the same as us, in that way.’

With a delicate consideration that belied his increasing inebriation, Farrier said, ‘And he's kept it up longer than either of us have. By God, has he kept it up. For eight years; and the whole length of the war. The chances, you know, were so frightfully small. But he's his own in the air. On the ground he’s like any other.’

Jon wasn’t sure what he made of this, or that he liked it. Farrier’s furrowed brow and cloudy look seemed incompatible with an outright warning-off, and yet how else to read the reminder that he had known Collins in the air—so much more important and intimate than in bed—and as his superior, no less? Jon wondered how that—translated for them, and leapt back almost physically from the thought: it almost never did translate, anyway. He himself was living proof of that.

He tried to be forgiving. It must have been pretty ghastly for Farrier—perhaps his way of coping had been to stifle hope, or at least not nurture it, and then to discover that Iain was still alive, and moreover, still interested, might have been almost more disconcerting than delightful, at first. Candour was the thing: without prurience, but total candour. And he was just about plastered enough to attempt it.

‘But he is different—from both of us, anyway, more than we are from each other. We wouldn’t be here if he weren’t. Either of us, in his shoes, would have made sure that we _didn’t_ meet.’

The naval toast to wives and sweethearts occurred to him, but he buttoned it. That would lighten the mood with some fellows, but not with Farrier, who was probably the sort who left a party if someone showed up in drag.

Farrier stubbed his cigarette and looked up. His eyes had hardened, though they were not unfriendly, and like granite, almost sparkled. ‘To Ourselves,’ he said, raising his glass.

Jon’s astonished bark of laughter could not impede the ritual response. ‘As no-one else is likely to concern themselves with our welfare,’ he capped.

It was not until he was standing at the bar again that it occurred to him that both of them, he in his thoughts, and Farrier aloud, had skirted the toast particular to today, Thursday: the savagely self-interested one— _a bloody foe and a sickly season_ —that wished your messmates dead for a greater share of prize money or a promotion. And if he was thinking it, there was a bloody good chance that Farrier was too.

 

* * *

 

Geoff drew on his cigarette, coughed, then drew on it again. He rather wished he had his pipe, but it and his pouch of tobacco were buried somewhere in his suitcase, and he didn't like to go rummaging while Iain and Marlow still slept. The cigarettes were Iain’s: he had left the packet and his lighter out on the deal table, where he had had a last fag before collapsing onto the cot nearest the bed.

It was about three in the morning, and already the sky was lightening to a promising blue. Geoff was still drunk, unsteady; an exterior wall provided as good of a surface as any on which to lean while he smoked. The trees clotted around the cottage were black and indistinct, and the grass at his feet was wet with dew. From every side came the cries of warblers, chiffchaffs, finches, so loud that he didn't hear it when Iain slipped out of the cottage and came to lean beside him. He saw a shadow in his periphery and then Iain was there, with him.

‘Light one for me? Someone—’ said Iain, knowing who it was, and probably smiling, though Geoff couldn’t quite see, ‘nicked my lighter while I was sleeping.’

Yes—as the flame illuminated Iain’s face Geoff saw that he was smiling. After he’d had his first drag, which was always more satisfying than the rest, Geoff kissed him. It was not a prelude to or a plea for anything else.

Settling back against the wall, Iain said, ‘How’s the heid?’

Jon and Geoff had returned to the cottage about two hours after closing time, having walked more than half the way before thumbing down a lift. By that time Jon was stumbling, and Geoff had the feeling of being fathoms deep within himself. The cool damp air was pleasant, but ineffective as a cure for drunkenness, and when they arrived Iain laughed at them. Iain had spent the evening at his father’s villa; he complained in an unrevealing way about stovies and rumbledethumps and nothing but tea to wash them down with.

When it came time to assign sleeping quarters, each of them had insisted that one of the others should take the bed, and made various arguments as to why he himself should not, until at last Geoff and Iain allied to persuade Marlow that he really ought to be the one in place of honour. Jon had seemed put out about it. Geoff wondered what was so appealing about the prospect of sleeping on a cot next to another cot on which Iain was also sleeping. Having just done so, Geoff could not say it was romantic: it put him in mind of dormitory huts, which was perhaps why he’d woken before three.

In response to Iain’s inquiry Geoff grunted and put his cigarette out. Iain, then, was upon him, cupping his cheeks, kissing his mouth. He pulled back only to say, ‘I’ve got a mate coming round with his Land Rover about four. Still time for you to blow me. —What are you looking at me like that for? You did it often enough when we were at Biggin. … Oh, is it _Jon_? He’s dead to the world. And I’d make it up to him later anyway, you couldn’t call it unsporting.’

‘I could,’ said Geoff, ‘and I would. No, we both ought to shave before we leave: your beard is coming in and it looks frightful.’ But he kissed Iain once more before they went in, as one would give a last pat to a lucky charm.

 

* * *

 

Before the day of the Common Riding had even come to an end, Jon was remembering it in kaleidoscopic fragments, irritably, because he wanted to have as clear an account as possible to take back to Patrick. He had woken feeling quite all right, always a bad sign, to the flicker of an oil lamp from the next room and Iain and Farrier’s increasingly vocal imprecations upon the range. He had not wrestled since boyhood with the Trennels boiler—a Victorian brute of untold, practically sentient malevolence—to be defeated by a mere kitchen stove, however, and before his hangover had properly kicked in he had both a copper of water for tea and shaving boiling atop it, and his companions’ derisive admiration for the feat.

A hipflask began to circulate in the Land Rover on the way down; he lost count of how many others were thrust from hand to hand as they followed the flute-band through the streets, and the population emerged from their houses to swell the crowd, gay and somnambulant like so many children of Hamelin. On the green slopes beyond the town, as hounds ran hither and thither, he temporarily misplaced Iain and Farrier, but on his return to the marketplace found them flanking a grim-looking woman with a handcart, who wordlessly served rum and milk in paper cups, apparently gratis and limitless.

Farrier’s frown of possessive concern was imprinted like a watermark over Jon’s memory of Andrew Collins taking the standard, but Iain had not looked in the least envious as the ringing cheer went up: just flushed and sweaty with rum and fraternal pride, a large, ugly vein standing out through the thin skin of his brow. It was the done thing, apparently, for all hale young men (and one or two intrepid girls) who did not have the fortune to be on horseback to scramble after the mounted party as it pelted up Kirk Wynd; at Iain’s heels, Jon felt his five years seniority more than ever, but was basely pleased to note that Farrier lagged behind them both. They came to an unexpected and unwelcome ford, which wet them all to the thighs, then there was more hanging about, as the horsemen rode up to circle the the obelisk on Whita Hill, more hipflasks, and then the Cornet galloping down the strait, the other horsemen flying after him. Rather an awkward, gangling man on foot, whose head under its bowler was a disconcertingly shapeless, starchy echo of Iain’s, Andrew had an undeniably beautiful seat on a horse. The pursuing riders blurred, and Jon took a heavy, cross-legged step to one side, blinking: his empty stomach had absorbed a fairly astonishing quantity of spirits for mid-morning. Farrier saw it, and clapped him nauseatingly on the shoulder.

A tubby, bespectacled man stood on a horse’s back in full-lunged anathematisation of _land-loupers and dub-scoupers and gae by the gate swingers who breed hurdums or durdums, huliments or buliments, hagglements and bragglements, to be nailed by their lugs to the Tron wi a twal’penny nail_ (Patrick would like that, the gruesomely extravagant shillingsworth of hardware in particular, Jon hoped he could remember it all). They saw the procession round the town, floral crown and thistle, spade and herring and barley bannock. At some point they were in the Eskdale Hotel, so hungry that they were virtually inhaling Spam and paste sandwiches and the inevitable stovies, which it seemed even the combined efforts of Hitler and the Ministry of Food had been unable to suppress. There was a confused interlude of wandering damp-shod in the streets while girls and small boys danced in rings, sprigs of heather pinned to their frocks and coats. Then it must have been midday, because the bars opened, and they postponed with beer the headache of growing sobriety.

Jon lost money on a horse-race and won some of it back on a foot-race; he dozed in the deep grass of the commons they were securing until his feet and trouser-legs were almost dry again. He met Iain’s father, who looked like Iain, but dried out, shrunk and kippered. The bank manager said something neither friendly nor ironical which Jon thought contained the phrase ‘Deil’s buttermilk’, but that must surely have been an hallucination brought on by Sassanach prejudice. There were more sandwiches, and then they were in the Buck. Temporarily separated from the others, Jon spoke to a shepherd who shook his grizzled head at the differences between his own sheep-rearing calendar and that obtaining in Dorset; the old man seemed tolerantly willing to believe in the existence of southwestern England, if someone would only provide him with concrete evidence. Unable to decrypt some of his pronouncements even after three or four requests for clarification, Jon slightly desperately remarked that it was very interesting to hear so much Scots spoken so close to the English border. ‘Ah, naw,’ the other contradicted, ‘fowk hereaboots dinna spak the Lawlan leid nae mair.’ Jon got another round in.

Iain returned, only to be claimed by a ‘smoker’ for friends and relatives of the Cornet: Jon and Farrier glanced at one another uncertainly, as if the primary connection were between them rather than to Iain. Drunk and unselfconscious, Iain grinned with half his mouth and said, ‘Gie oer havering, I’ve mair reflected glory than I ken what to do wi, the day.’ Jon wondered if Farrier reacted as he did to the accent and dialect, if Iain played up to it when they—and checked himself.

The host of the smoker was Andrew’s right-hand man, who had been Cornet through the war years, or perhaps the left-hand man, who had done the office in ‘39. Or perhaps the other way about. Supper was a sit-down affair, beef broth, chicken salad and blancmange, two bottles of whisky on the table between ten drinkers. Mr Collins, one of the remaining four with a teacup at his place, glared at everyone, but especially at his elder son. Aproned women—the mother and two, perhaps three, sisters of the house—flitted in and out of the kitchen. Andrew and his flankers left early, to get saddled up for the last procession and the return of the standard. A short time later the younger men were liberated _tae gang to the dauncin_. Mr Collins’ walnut face twisted into a kind of scowling leer, and Iain, his arm dangling over the back of his chair, affected elaborate interest in a china cabinet teeming with souvenirs, spaniels and shepherdesses.

Jon was not surprised, when they turned into the marketplace again, to see a circle of nuns dancing the polka; he would hardly, at this stage, have been surprised by pink elephants.

‘The convent’s out at Erkinholme,’ Iain bawled reassuringly.

Iain’s reflected glory had already attracted a small flock of girls in defiantly resourceful pastiches of fashion: without having asked exactly, Jon found himself accepted by one of these, whose mauve dress was newer and smarter than the others’ cotton prints but engaged in a duel to the death with light ginger hair, freckles on a skimmed-milk complexion and a broad mouth recently re-painted cherry red. Her right incisor (big, but not protuberant) bore a streak of the same cosmetic, and he thought for the second time in two days of Peter Marlowe, who had hardly entered his thoughts for a full two years before, and was, in any case, dead.

The dance proper was held on the racecourse, the first outdoor one since the war. At some point the mauve-and-ginger girl, nimble, cheerful and full of slurred, incomprehensible gossip, was replaced by a short, hirsute creature who smelled of damp lily-of-the-valley talc and had clearly always taken the man’s part in her school-gymnasium dancing classes. Jon winced through a foxtrot and a quickstep, wryly amused that his immutable role of leading out the local Lesbian seemed to have transferred so seamlessly from Dorset to Dumfriesshire, but then she tried to kiss him in the shadow of the tea urns and he had to flee along the white railings until, thankfully, he found Iain, once again cornered by the belligerent man they’d met in the hotel bar. He couldn’t remember what he said, but there was no violence.

He couldn’t remember how they all got back to the cottage, either—he had an odd, windy memory of sitting on the side of the road and refusing to move until some obscure, almost folkloric condition was met—but he woke in the fungal ambiance of the box-bed, staring up at its square-cut canopy panels, one naked foot hanging out of it, and the fully shod one inside. He’d dreamed of being hanged for an unspecified crime of which he was nonetheless indubitably guilty; putting a finger to his collar, he found he had blacked out without even loosening his tie.

 

* * *

 

By midday Saturday Collins was hungover and exhausted, and radiantly happy in the way that one can only be when physical strain has dampened the mind until all that’s left is the immediate. He was shot through with nostalgia for the worst of the war, when his squadron was running on half-strength through an endless cycle of readiness and scrambling, and his grief at Geoff’s loss was daily deepened: he drank too much at nights, and upon waking at three or three-thirty cured his hangovers with Benzedrine, so that by the time he was in the air he did not give a damn about anything but flying. How good the flying had been, then!

Of course he was only walking now. He and Jon and Geoff had got a lift to Canonbie, which was nestled just up against the border, and traced the Esk back north till it split off into Byre Burn. The land along the burn was dense with midsummer growth; thin pines cast shade over rowans and hawthorns, and the ground underfoot was mossy, layered with ferns. Now and then their path was blocked by a tangle of fallen trees and overhanging limbs. Collins felt a fondness for his homeland that he decided not to be embarrassed by, perhaps in private defiance of Jon and Geoff, who had latched onto sheep, care and breeding of, as a topic of mutual interest. Despite having spent the past six or seven years unwillingly enrolled in a training course on the habits of the sort of Englishman who joined a fighter squadron, Collins couldn’t tell whether the two of them were getting on. Either they were, or they had agreed to pretend.

Upon reaching the waterfall they had come to see they spent a moment in contemplation of it. Standing at the edge of the stream they watched the water swell over the highest edge of rock and splash downwards in stages, terminating in a frothy, silty pool. The usual jokes were made about the local name for the place (‘Fairy Loup,’ though to Collins it evoked nursery stories about resentful creatures in green, rather than Piccadilly Circus); then they settled on a level patch of grass for sandwiches and whisky. Collins lay back and smoked, watching light cloud passing overhead. The fine weather was holding.

Two hours later they were lost. Not enough to despair of their lives—Collins was fairly sure they were still in Scotland—but enough that Geoff had taken on the bright, confident manner that portended a series of poor decisions. Jon walked twenty yards off, whistling a tune that sometimes sounded a bit like ‘Men of Harlech’ and at others like ‘The British Grenadiers,’ but mostly like nothing on earth; stopping, if he showed signs of closing the gap, to examine spurious nature specimens. Jon had mentioned, once or twice, that his father had been given to what sounded like fairly incandescent rages. It was impossible to tell, from the nonchalant turn of phrase he always used— _and then the Guv’nor made Rather A Scene_ —whether he had been in the habit of at all costs avoiding or provoking these.

It was partly Jon’s fault anyway. He had spotted a goshawk, sloping low on rabbit (which escaped) near the edge of a copse north of Byre Burn. He insisted on following her into the wood; she must once have belonged to someone, he said, there had been no wild goshawks in Britain for nearly a century. They had stalked the bird deeper than Collins knew the woodland went, Jon turning in exasperation as he and Geoff crashed through undergrowth, finally reaching a space not big enough to be called a clearing, but big enough to have its own pocket acoustic, across which broke the most extraordinary cowboy wail: _heeee-yahh_!

 _Fuck me_ , Jon said, and shinned silently and rapidly up a tree. Geoff whispered _I could have done that when I was thirteen, maybe, but put away childish things, you know_. Collins caught his breath; he had wanted to say something—he wasn’t quite sure what—about Jon’s friendship with the boy, Patrick Merrick, ever since he’d run into him in the cottage that evening three or four weeks ago. No-one who wasn’t queer could possibly understand what his concern was; everyone who was queer and not Geoff would get the wrong idea in the worst way possible. Why did the most perfect conversational entrées always have to be served up at exactly the wrong time?

He must have visibly havered, because Geoff asked what was wrong, but before he could explain that he couldn’t explain, nothing was, Jon had dropped back into their midst and was, in the low voice of manic enthusiasm, describing the newly-fledged young in the nest above, twisting a thin leather strap between his fingers. Jon almost always had some bit or other of hawking gear in his pockets, Collins thought in an attempt to suppress growing alarm.

‘It’s a pity—’ Jon began.

‘No. No. For Christ’s sake no. I refuse to share quarters with one of those bampot birds.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I haven’t got the first thing—no furniture, nothing. The poor creature would probably die before we could get it home. It’s just rather a pity.’

Jon’s subsequent explanation of the necessaries for making a hawk at home distracted them all sufficiently that they left the wood at a rather different point from the one they’d entered it at. Having an aerial map of the area in mind, Collins suggested they cut across pastureland to save time on the walk back to Canonbie, rather than following the burn back to the Esk and the Esk back to the town. They were still in pastureland now, which meant that they’d at least not strayed as far as Carlisle, Dumfries, Edinburgh or Newcastle, but beyond that he knew nothing. The white heather and the buttercups were blooming, and the sheep were as numerous as the flowers.

In the placatingly noisy way he sometimes spoke when he’d noticed Collins was in a poodie and wanted to get him out of it, Geoff said, ‘Shame the Riding is in July; if it were in August we could have had grouse.’

By the time Collins turned to look at him Geoff’s face showed he’d realised he’d misspoken, but it was too late to stop Collins laughing.

‘Oh aye,’ said Collins, snorting, choking, ‘every autumn since I was a boy we had a letter from the Duke of Buccleuch asking us to join in the shooting.’ Catching Geoff’s annoyance he said, ‘You do know we’re not supposed to be here? If a landowner caught us he’d be within his natural rights to shoot us.’

‘One has to prove damage. The idea of prosecuting for trespass is mostly bunk. Anyway, if we happen across someone we can speak to him,’ said Geoff. ‘Ask him for directions to the nearest village and we’ll be on our way. No reason he wouldn’t forgive us; seventy times seven and all that.’

‘Because you’ve always been a stunning success at talking yourself out of enemy territory.’ Collins knew better even as he spoke, and felt all the same a rush of the most delicious gratification.

It had been months since Geoff’s capture had been alluded to between them, and about a year since they had had that earth-shaking row over it, the one that had seen (but not ended with) a china table lamp being ripped out of its socket and thrown against the wall. Considering the intensity of the emotions discharged it was surprising the destruction hadn’t been worse. But the matter of who was right and who wrong had not been settled. Collins still believed it an act of short-sighted, narcissistic foolishness that took a good pilot out of the fighting just when good pilots were needed most; Geoff maintained that he had done what he thought was right at the time and should not be criticised for having done so. Both of them seemed to have thought that they could go on being lovers without ever speaking of it again. But of course the— What was that line in that poem Geoff liked? ‘Things fall apart, the bottom must fall out?’

‘I did once make it as far as the Swiss border,’ said Geoff. ‘Some three hundred, four hundred miles. If I’d your navigational prowess I’d have ended up in Danzig.’

‘If you’d my sense you’d have made it back across the Channel in June of 1940.’

Jon came up behind Geoff, his hands full of heather and juniper or whatever the fuck, as if summoned by the word _Danzig_ —the (fairly ancestral) home of the man he had wept for in the Royal Station Hotel.

‘I say, Iain,’ he protested, scattering pink petals and purple berries, ‘is that really necessary?’

Jon and Geoff engaged, then, in one of those silent subsurface exchanges of expression that were particular to the English and could not be interpreted by anyone else. It got Collins’ hackles up. Geoff seemed offended—what right had he? What right had Jon? This was Collins’ territory, spiritually if not legally; these were his boy friends. And they were making an ass of him as if he were the odd one out.

He told Jon, ‘You weren’t there,’ because he hadn’t been: ‘You were at Hornchurch, you’d had other men to keep you company then.’

Jon leaned back in faint nonplus. Slack skin under his jaw creased; his sandy eyebrows rose, driving deep trenches into his forehead. He gave the terrible shrill Saxon war-cry, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know _what_ you mean.’

‘I mean’—Geoff gave Collins a warning look, but he persisted—‘you can’t pretend I was your first choice.’

Jon’s posture altered; he shook off the Blimpish look and his shoulders squared. His voice remained high and strained. ‘I—can’t pretend—you—what? I meant that it was poor form to rake over old coals. One does what one can, with the gen one has at the time. Can’t blame a chap for try—’ he looked, in costive agony, at Geoff, but Geoff was looking away, ‘for—particularly when—’ he threw the last floral fragments viciously aside, showing mauve-streaked palms, ‘he had time to repent at leisure, for God’s sake.’

‘Jesus,’ said Collins, ‘you sound just like each other.’

Geoff put his hand on Collins’ shoulder to stay him physically, as if he were a horse; Collins shook it off. Having at last been driven to the point of verbal intervention Geoff rather calmly said, ‘Why should I have bothered making it back across the Channel? You’d gone down, and you hadn’t jettisoned your canopy. I thought you had drowned.’

Clouds the size and shape of a fat man’s fists had begun to gather on the horizon some time ago. Now they cast shadows upon the ground, across Jon’s broad, rustic face and Geoff’s pained, tired one. A spatter of cold rain hit Collins’ neck, as if someone had thrown it. He felt the spectre of sea-spray and realised he was remembering leaning over the side of the little boat that had picked him up in the middle of the Channel, hauling another oil-soaked Tommy onto the deck. He remembered, too, clutching the arm of a boy still half in the water, craning his neck to watch Farrier chase the Heinkel diving towards the minesweeper. It was funny how, having done that, he was still so put out by the fact of rain.

‘If that’s true,’ Collins panted, heaving himself up a slope towards the only tree in view, ‘then it’s even worse. It’s not pride, it’s bloody sentiment. As bad as one of those chaps who keeps a photo of his sweetheart and kisses it before he flies. Don’t you remember, the first time you got me into bed, you told me to drop sentiment as soon as the scramble bell went?’

The tree was a chestnut, a large, broad-spreading one that looked as good a shelter as any. Once they were all underneath it, however, they realised the wind was sweeping the rain up the slope and flinging it straight at them; already the soil around the base of the tree, the tree’s trunk itself, were beginning to darken with the damp.

‘Yes,’ said Geoff, patting in his breast pocket for cigarettes and then thinking better of it. ‘I was rather worried you would form an attachment. I didn’t anticipate that I would form one myself; one never does anticipate. But by Dunkirk things were different.’

Jon was kicking the ground, pink to his ear-tips. ‘This is futile,’ he said, ‘no shelter at all. Let’s walk on.’ He stepped from beneath the branches and turned, his usually open face screwed into a mean, puerile grimace. _Broken home_ , Collins thought instantly, and remembered that Jon had never spoken of his mother, except to say she died when he was still quite a small boy. ‘And if you two would care to stow your dirty linen just until we find our way back to the Ewes Road,’ Jon added, ‘I’d be uncommonly grateful.’

Paralysed, Collins watched Geoff twitch and frown, and open his mouth and say, ‘Well in fact I’d be grateful not to know that while I was just settling into Colditz Castle you were at the York Royal Station Hotel begging Iain to bugger you, but I can’t help that now.’ And as a finishing touch he said, ‘Though it doesn’t seem either of us were enjoying ourselves much.’

Collins wasn’t sure quite what he expected to come at the end of the airless, muggy moment’s silence: Geoff and Jon wrestling on the damp scroggy grass? That had a certain appeal, to more than just his vanity. But Jon merely gave him a light glance, out of what Collins thought of as his Marston Moor repertoire, a to-your-part-in-this-frankly-unedifying-fracas-unbecoming-officers-holding-His-Majesty’s-commission-we-will-return-after-a-short-adjournment look.

‘Whit’s that look in aid of? It mightae worked on some P/O fucking Prune you were trynae blame for you cocking up in triplicate and losing the carbons, but it willna work on me.’

Technically, he supposed that was a breach of his Staysh’s confidence, but men with tales to tell about Marlow’s stupendous administrative incompetence and his facility for making incriminating paperwork dissolve were protected by their ubiquity. Anyway, Jon ignored him and said sweetly to Geoff, ‘As a connoisseur of that sort of begging yourself, I’m sure you’ll agree the venue was pretty insalubrious. A filthy fleapit at eighteen shillings a night. But the dirty linen’s still not mine.’

‘You’ve rather tried to make it yours,’ said Geoff; by which he meant, _You’ve rather tried to make_ him _yours_.

The shoulders of Jon’s grey worsted jacket were beginning to darken with rain; his rough hair stood in furrows across his scalp. He looked from Geoff to Collins and back again, and wiped the heel of his hand over his mouth, out of which the first sound was not just inarticulate but almost inorganic, like the opening note of a flak gun. He tried again and wheezed, ‘Ah—aha ha—you, you really think—you really think, Farrier, that I’m trying to cut him out from under your nose? What would I want to do a stupid thing like that for? I’ve got everything I need, and what’s more I hardly had to ask. This time or in ‘43.’

Collins was not sure what was so stinging about this: Jon was a convenience for him too, an agreeable amenity laid on in deathly Dorset. And his own virility admitted a substantial component of tarty availability: it was one of his charms, he felt. He had no ambitions in the direction of romance with anyone but Geoff, and even then ‘romance’ was not what he would call it. But wasn’t it Jon who was always asking after love, if not from Collins then from the universe? Collins reckoned it had amused him to imagine himself the recipient of some secret and unrequited longing; pleased him to think that Geoff was not a one-off, that another English gentleman had fallen under his sway. If that was not the case, reflected Collins, he must be a better fuck than he had thought.

‘He’s not lying, Geoff,’ said Collins. ‘Not about not wanting me, anyway. But he’s no got everything he needs. He wants some boy who’ll look up at him wi stars in his eyes.’ He had meant Jacek, but directly the words were out of his mouth he thought: _Patrick_.

It took him another moment—so intent had he been on assuaging Geoff’s usually well-concealed jealousy—to realise that was how Jon was bound to take it too, and then the ground lurched at him as if through a foggy windshield, a tingling emptiness opened in the middle of his skull, he snorted to breathe, and couldn’t. At least he’d kept his feet, he thought, then staggered onto a slick of rain-moistened cowshite, and promptly lost them. How long had it been, since he’d got a proper neffle on the nose?

Accepting this as the price of having been a bit more of a cunt than he’d intended, Collins hefted himself up with as much dignity as could be managed in a wet field. As he got to his feet, however, Jon was knocked off his: Geoff had thrown a punch forceful enough to revenge not only the one Collins had taken, but the full list of indignities he had suffered while he was imprisoned and Collins was fishing for a fuck.

‘Ah Jesus,’ said Collins. He tried not to let on he was gratified to know that Geoff would go in swinging on his behalf, even if the anger expelled was in part directed towards him. ‘I’m all right, for fuck’s sake, that’s enough!’

His nose, now he was vertical, started to bleed in the abundant, inconvenient way of noses. He felt in his pockets for a handkerchief, and finding only a torn handbill from the day before, bled all over the schedule of races and games.

Jon was still on his back. Geoff looked at a loss as only a man with the right physique and the wrong temperament to make a useful brawler can, as if he meant to offer Jon a hand up, honour having been served.

‘I say, I think I’ve—’ he said, a little shakily. But Jon groaned and rolled over onto his hands and knees. Both Collins and Geoff instinctively averted their eyes as he retched.

‘What was that all about?’ Geoff asked, wagging a hand that was clearly unaccustomed to pugilistic exercise. ‘I had to, you quite see, of course, but I wouldn’t want you to think that—’ Seeming to recognise that this explanation was going nowhere, he stuck his knuckles in his mouth and sucked.

Collins choked on a ferrous bubble and spat, shaking his head in a _not now_. He wondered if he looked in as poor shape as Jon did: two roundels of mud on the knees of his flannels, grass stains on elbows and untucked shirtfront, bloody mouth like a stunned monkfish. Jon wiped blood across his face and clutched at his hair, transferring it there too. It was too comical, too pathetic, it really was: survivors of active service in some of the most hazardous theatres of the world’s most destructive conflict, and they couldn’t even manage a stroll in the countryside.

‘Dinna ken if you’ll credit this, but I didn’t—’ His voice came out stuffy and indistinct; oh Christ, the last thing he needed was a broken nose to reset in the shard of mirror hanging above the kitchen sink. If they ever made it back to the house. He didn’t think it _was_ broken, but it was surprising how easily it could happen. ‘It wasn’t Patrick I meant.’

‘I know,’ Jon acknowledged, with a sideways glance at Geoff that did not speak of total reconciliation. ‘I lost my head rather. He seems to bring out that pater—protective instinct in me.' 

Geoff swelled into indignation that, if justifiable, was no less Blimpish for it. Collins saw him at fifty or sixty, over the _Times_ and kedgeree in the dank Gloucestershire breakfast-room with its threadbare Wilton carpet, the only heat coming from the spirit stoves on the sideboard. Would he be there too? Neither of them would be, he hoped. A retirement somewhere sunny and don’t think about the currency restrictions.

‘And who the bloody hell,’ Geoff pronounced, ‘is _Patrick_ when he’s at home?’

 

* * *

 

The cottage, whose lack of modern amenities had at first worried Jon, seemed, upon their return, the cosiest place civilisation could have devised. They had had a hell of a time getting back: even after they had happened across a farmer on his way to Canonbie, who had taken pity and allowed them to squeeze into his car (to the back of which was attached a trailer filled with bleating sheep), they had had to find a lift to Langholm, and from there a lift to the cottage. Once the journey had come to an end they had all agreed there was no better cure for their sufferings than to stay put and drink; so while Jon took charge of the stove once more, this time to heat water to fill the tin hip-bath that sat on the floor of the kitchen, Iain broke into a bottle of whisky.

Jon bathed first, staring up at the mouldy ceiling, trying not to listen in on the quiet, seemingly purposeless conversation drifting in from the other room. Afterwards he lay on the bed in his pants, vest and socks, lifting up only to take an occasional drink from the tea-cup of whisky and water that he had rested on a book lying on the mattress next to him. Farrier and Iain both wandered in and out of the room as the other bathed; it was cloyingly domestic in a way Jon had not observed up-close before, and he wavered between irritation and an exhausted gloominess. Once or twice he thought he caught the sound of kissing, and felt a pain in his gut like an ulcer, which he remedied by filling his cup again.

He bucked himself up rather consciously: it was childish to be embarrassed by their intimacy, dog-in-the-mangerish to resent it. It wasn’t what he wanted for himself: some bloke floating about Trennels in a dressing-gown, getting at the crossword before he did, using the hot water, eating in the library (not that Jon gave a tuppenny damn about the condition of the seventeenth-century Frobisher or the rare first printing of de Lessep’s Maritime Atlas with all the errors, but the Guv’nor’s rebukes sounded yet from beyond the veil), taking time from the hawks, provoking Tessa’s jealous sulks and nudges, being referred to by Mrs Bertie in the village as _Mr Jonathan’s great friend_. Even regular sex wouldn’t quite compensate.

The left side of Jon’s face was tender and throbbing: he brought his fingertips to it and winced despite the lightness of the touch and the anaesthetic qualities of the booze. He had bathed it, but too late, and he was going to have a fine shiner and a guinea-pig cheek in the morning. He hadn’t busted Iain’s nose, as it turned out, which was probably just as well: a bent or dented conk would make his broad, inexplicably Scottish face seem even broader and more inexplicably Scottish-looking. But Jon had unquestionably got the worst of the outbreak of violence, and he felt justified in indulging himself in another spot of self-pity and whisky.

It came to him as he topped up the tea-cup that he hadn’t at any point really thought that Collins would make that particular insinuation: it was Maudie Culver he had punched. That wasn’t fair or rational, but there was nothing more to be done about it.

On cue, Iain appeared in doorway, wearing only a pair of clean, light flannels, a towel around his neck. Jon noticed, not for the first time, that his trousers were beginning to be tight, the flesh of his hips beginning to spill over his waistband. That was peace, Jon supposed, and victory; in ‘43 Iain had had the wasted thinness of the habitual user of amphetamines. Good-bye to all that, Jon thought.

Iain caught hold of the low lintel—perhaps he’d seen Jon’s light appraisal of his middle and decided to stretch it out a bit—and squinted with an intent that Jon recognised and responded to with shameful rapidity.

‘Mind if we join you? You’re monopolising that bottle.’

It wasn’t about the bottle, that much was clear. The (literally) sheepish lift back had done a good deal to turn an atmosphere of high dudgeon into one of chastened amusement; Jon’s better judgement suggested that the improvement depended on remaining chaste, but that judgement, never a particularly stable compound, was profoundly soluble in randiness and curiosity.

‘Yes, all right,’ he said, trying to sound non-committal.

But it was Farrier who took up the bottle, filling a tea-cup for himself, from which he took a long swallow. Iain flung himself onto the bed next to Jon and drank from his cup, then caressed the injured side of his face. Jon got a whiff of Lifebuoy soap.

‘Do you know,’ said Iain, sitting back, ‘how bloody lucky we are.’

He was asking himself as much as Jon, who hesitated to answer. The last thing Jon wanted was a recounting of losses, a session of stiff-lipped eulogy of the sort which in peacetime were only carried out by the very old. He was still a young man—fairly young, anyway—and what he wanted was simply to pass the rest of the weekend in drinking and fucking, and then go home to his hawks. _Hawk_ , he corrected glumly, but then, there was the nest on Leeper’s Bluff.

Lightly Jon said, ‘More than most,’ which sufficed.

Iain was distracted anyway: Farrier was coming round, taking care to place the cups on the shelf built into the head of the bed before sitting. Jon was curiously comforted by Farrier’s presence: now his pride had been appeased, Farrier emanated calmness in the same way of the house-dog who curls up at the feet of its master. He did not seem at all bothered to see Iain kiss Jon. His benign, dressing-gowned presence made the exhibitionist act seem curiously wholesome. The dressing-gown was dark, unostentatious, but silk: a garment that seemed to underline the fact that Farrier had seen so much less war than they had. It marooned him back in Nineteen Forty, when for everyone else the world had changed, changed utterly, a tumty something—how did it go, and was it the same one that had the falcon raking away?

Iain reached out to satisfy himself that Jon was hard, then let his hand rove around to squeeze his arse, tugging down his underpants at the back. It asked for reciprocation in kind, so Jon stroked Iain’s cock through the flannel and started to move on his fly buttons. He wouldn’t mind it if Iain sucked him off with Farrier there to watch, though the chances of that were probably slender enough, unless Iain was feeling especially perverse. He was hanged if he was doing the honours, though; Iain’s penchant for butting his cock against one’s cheek would be excruciating, for one thing, and for another—well, he had seen Farrier’s bee-stung lips, and he wasn’t about to try and compete. And any overture to Farrier must come through Iain—that wasn’t always the way it was when you played third to a couple, but it very definitely was in this case. Iain rolled over and got his cock out, issuing an invitation to Farrier, who was half-standing now, one knee on the bed, his dressing-gown coming open under the loosened cord, revealing the tip of a high-coloured prick. How did he transmit that overwhelming air of fleshiness, when his physique was objectively so ordinary, so similar to Jon’s own?

‘Come oan, Geoff,’ Iain wheedled, ‘show Marlow here one of yir _dives._ ’

‘Oh, shut up. I don’t, unlike you, actually find embarrassment an aphrodisiac.’ His blush might have belied or confirmed this assertion: there was no way of knowing.

‘Could have fooled me,’ Jon said, fascinated: it was close enough to how Iain was with him (which was to say, a bit like he was with Prisca when she was in the mood to refuse a fence), but crucially different, aware of Farrier’s dignity if only as something to be prodded and punctured. Jon had no particular dignity in Iain’s eyes, hardly surprising, after York, but—

Farrier paused in his stoop. ‘Shh. Listen.’

‘Fuck—’ Iain arched his back. ‘Stop pissing aboot—’

‘I’m serious. It’s a car. It’s going to stop here.’

Off to the side, Jon saw, as Iain clearly did not, the white of Farrier’s shying eye—that particular calibration of distant engine noise was a prison thing, not a professional or technical thing: how long did you have to cover up whatever it was, _could_ you cover it up, or was it better just to cut your losses and face the inevitable sojourn in the cooler? Jon said quickly, ‘He’s right, you know.’

‘Oh, shit.’ Collins sat up. ‘It’s my sister, and her glaikit oaf of a husband. She said she might—I never thought she’d actually—’

Luckily the one thing they could all do was scramble. Within two or three minutes—by the time there was a knock on the door—they were all dressed to a certain standard of decency. Farrier, who had had the most dressing to do out of the three of them, managed with astonishing quickness to get himself into not only a shirt, trousers and shoes but braces, properly buttoned and adjusted. Meanwhile Iain had only just done his flies and flung on a shirt, one half of which flopped out untucked; and the shirt, Jon realised, was one of his own.

‘Iain,’ warned Farrier, and pulled Iain back to tuck in his shirt—Jon’s shirt—before releasing him to answer the knock. That was perhaps not the best thing he could have done under the circumstances; spots of colour appeared high in Iain’s cheeks, and as he swung open the door he grinned stupidly.

She didn’t look like Iain. Jon hadn’t thought the question of family resemblance would interest him, but it did. She was slight and dark-haired: on her the tapering local face would probably be called heart-shaped, and attractive. Her dreadful block-heeled utility shoes only brought her up to about her brother’s chin. But the self-assurance with which she entered and took charge of the room was wholly his, only more so: seeing it embodied in feminine gait and gesture made him newly aware of how close to flirtation Iain’s ordinary social manner could steer. Normal men never noticed things like that, of course.

‘Hullo!’ she announced brightly. ‘Won’t you let us in? I brought you a wee bite of supper. I ken the way you bachelors are.’ Iain rocked on his heels and stood aside, grimacing wildly over her head. Jon looked away before he caught the giggles.

‘Honestly, we’re fine,’ Iain began, ‘we had a good dinner and there’s—’ The total household provender was comprised of a loaf of bread, two tins of sardines and one of evaporated milk.

His sister ignored him. She was carrying a dish covered in greaseproof paper and secured with string, which precluded affectionate greeting, though Jon suspected nothing of the kind would have happened anyway, it wasn’t a very Borders way of carrying on. Her husband, a tall, dimly good-looking character with a curiously juvenile haircut, shambled after her, carrying a small cardboard box, quite clearly still at the besotted stage. She put the dish down on the table and looked around, clucking.

‘Oh, isn’t it a pity? Puir Mrs Anderson, she was very weakly at the end. Do you remember Granny’s, Iain, it was just the same, but all nice and couthy?’

‘Aye, better than you, I dout. You were only about four years of age when she died.’

They had taken up the inimitable stance of warring siblings, formalised like fencers. She made her lunge: ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends?’

‘You met yesterday,’ Iain said with bad grace. ‘You must’ve.’ He relented, no match for her exasperatedly amused toss of the head: ‘Christine, this is Geoff Farrier, you’ve heard me talk about him. And Jon Marlow, he’s, eh, down in Dorset—and Jon, Geoff—Christine’s husband, James Irving, he farms out at Whitshiels.’

It was not an introduction calculated to make the subsequent handshakes and how-do-you-dos graceful, but eventually they were accomplished. Silently, James brought forth a bottle of Haig, and things started, minutely, to look up. But very minutely. Christine bustled, deploring dirt, the lack of crockery (though she had clearly expected it, there were plates and glasses in the box) and their negligence in having let the range go out, while the men sat crammed into the alcove beside it. James looked at his big knees, stymied by the social challenge of dissecting the Common Riding in the presence of both blood relatives of the Cornet and Englishmen; Geoff and Jon both decided at once that the situation required them to be the idiot tripper asking foolish questions, and interrupted each other repeatedly. Iain smoked and slouched, propelled inexorably back into adolescent moodiness.

After a geological epoch that their wristwatches unaccountably measured as ten minutes, Christine sat down in the armchair. ‘There. Won’t be long now. Whit’d you do to your lip, Iain? It’s aa swelt up.’

‘Hit in the face—’ He paused just long enough to make Jon writhe. ‘By a branch. We went for a walk, and Marlow followed a goshawk into a wee shaw. He keeps hawks.’

‘Did you get a clatter too, Mr Marlow?’ she said, tapping the left side of her own face. ‘It must have been an awfu dangerous sortae wood.’

‘No, I mean, er. Yes. Well, it was a bit of a comedy of errors. We’re not altogether competent at ground level, I’m afraid.’

Christine looked sidelong at her brother. ‘Weel, at least I can set Father’s mind at rest. He had himself fair certain we were walking into an orgy coming up here, didn’t he, Jimmy? Kept on muttering about _fauncy weemen_ , and I said it was the daftest thing I ever heard, why would you come up here for the like of that when you’ve night clubs and jazz singers all sorts doon in England, and that put him in a proper rage, the haill John Knox.’ She wriggled her shoulders in delight. What was it about girls and rows? Jon wondered. His own sister had been the same, pertly provoking the Guv'nor and quivering with relish when he blew off. Perhaps it was because they didn’t get thrashed, but given the choice, he’d always opted for a whacking over a jaw.

The pink spots on Iain’s cheeks darkened and spread.

‘Well, you know,’ Geoff said rescuingly, ‘the reputation of the RAF in that regard has been exaggerated rather, you know. Bit of a hangover from the last lot, daredevil aces in their flying machines and so on.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Collins squeaked. Jon cringed: he tried to avoid it, himself, but the ghastly pantomime of heterosexual rivalry with a man you were actually fucking wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. He supposed his own deflections (chiefly, a WAAF-wide reputation for being Safe in Taxis that led the inattentive to assume he was getting more than his share, despite the jug ears and the mug) were just as embarrassing to those who knew him well.

‘I _don’t_ want to know. I reckon—’ Christine glanced at James. ‘I reckon the war’s done us all good. The auld people say they just want things to get back to how they were before, but they willna, and that’s no so bad. Most people still want a—a family life, but some don’t, and it proved there’s other things for them.’ She blushed: the same high pink spots. ‘I’m talking about girls, I suppose, really, but whit’s sauce for the goose—’

‘You’re talking about your gang of harpies from the High School,’ James growled, not without affection. ‘Yon Peggy Armstrong wagered me hauf a croon we’d have a woman Cornet afore ten years.’ He looked up from his knees with the air of someone reporting his definite sighting of a skinny fellow on a pale horse to a sceptical crowd.

‘Did you take her up on it?’ Jon asked, relieved that the subject of sex had taken a turn to the general.

‘Aye. It’s a sure pay-out, and I’m a patient man.’

This was so evidently true that they all laughed; more whisky and the welcome warmth of cottage pie meant they parted an awkward sort of friends. But the inhibiting aftereffect of family presence hung heavily over them: Iain flopped provocatively around under it, but it was no good, and they were half-cut anyway. Mortification had caused them to comport themselves more or less respectably while in the company of Iain’s relations, despite the quantity of spirits taken; when alone again, they began to stumble, to drop things, to forget what they were saying in the middle of saying it. Farrier lay back on the bed and fell into a doze while smoking a cigarette, which burned a small hole in the sheet before Iain realised what was happening and put it out.

Iain sat on the edge of the bed at first, slurring family gossip to Farrier, who may or may not have been listening; then he sprawled out and went on talking with his face half-pressed to the pillow. Then the cottage was quiet except for the sound of rain on the windows. Iain and Farrier lay asleep, on their sides, Iain’s chest to Farrier’s back. One of them was snoring, but Jon couldn’t make out which one. He lay wakeful with the sort of preemptive hangover that something just less than a skinful can induce, imagining that he could feel the flesh around his eye-socket filling with black blood. Eventually he fell asleep, and dreamed of fillet steak.

 

* * *

 

Standing in the kitchen, gulping down a cup of water with his eyes shut to keep out the sun, Geoff realised he had grown old. In the early thirties, when he was 600 Squadron AAF and flying Wapitis out of Hendon at weekends, he could have a bottle of brandy to himself, pass out at three or four, and wake at seven good as new. Now he ached, everywhere: his head, his back, his neck, his knees, his fingers. It was past nine, and he had slept the night through, but he was tired. Was it prison that had made him this way, or was it simply being thirty-five? He supposed he could ask Marlow, who was the same age.

Marlow had not woken gracefully either. Geoff, for the half hour after he had regained consciousness, had pressed his face into Iain’s shoulder (they had sprawled away from each other in the night) and tried to will away his hangover; he only got up when he could not put off going out for a piss any longer. When he returned Marlow was pulling his blanket over his head and making a monstrous noise of anguish.

‘Gie ower greetin, man,’ Iain had said, ‘and get in here wi me. It’s the only cure.’ He patted the mattress where Geoff had just been sleeping. ‘There’s room for Geoff and aa.’

Ah, Geoff had thought: so they would, after all. A year ago he and Iain were only just resuming, slowly and carefully, what they had started in thirty-nine. If someone had told him then what he was doing now, and with whom, he would have told that person to go to hell, and to take this Marlow chap along. Yet he felt, watching Iain drag Marlow into bed, remarkably little except randiness, the capacity for which he was grateful to have regained. There was one other thing: his throat was dry. As Iain and Marlow began to kiss he trundled into the kitchen.

Setting down the cup, lighting his first fag of the morning, Geoff became aware of feeling something. Psychologically, not physically. It wavered between pleasurable and bewildering. What it was, he couldn’t say: not tiredness, not ache. Not desire either, though there was that also. After a moment the feeling faded.

By the time he made his way back to the bed Iain was on top of Marlow, sitting in his lap and pinning his hands above his head. Geoff took the opportunity to admire Iain’s arse, the slightly fatty spread of his thighs, before climbing back onto what he had claimed as his side of the mattress. Perhaps sensing that Geoff might, left unattended, become jealous, Iain took a hand off Marlow’s wrists to pull Geoff into a kiss, which Marlow took as his chance to reach down and frig himself and Iain, both together in one slow, sloppy motion. Iain’s mouth tasted the same as Marlow’s breath smelt.

It was mostly Iain who talked: between kisses he murmured the sort of dull, ordinary, effortlessly arousing things he did when he wanted to communicate that he was sexually contented. ‘Ah, yeah,’ he said, ‘ooh, there’s a good lad, lift up for me, just like that—Yeah, just like that.’ He was kneeling now; Marlow’s legs were spread for him, and he was feeling between them with the confidence and ease he exhibited when approaching the dartboard in a pub. That was to say, with the vanity of a proven success. Marlow was red to the tips of his floppy scent-hound ears, and he glanced over at Geoff, then hastily glanced away, before he jerked his hips up and held his cock and balls clear of his arsehole. Geoff wasn’t sure if the pang in his stomach was more arousal or humiliation; both were certainly present.

‘Ah, fuck _me_ ,’ said Iain, sitting back on his heels. He seemed so genuinely put out that Geoff held back from making the obvious joke. ‘I’d meant to buy Vaseline in London; I forgot to tell you I hadn’t.’

Before Geoff could ask whether the ‘you’ in that sentence referred to one of them in particular, Jon sat up and said, ‘Oh, not to worry! There’s a tin in my bag, if you’ll just...’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Geoff, ‘were you _so_ certain he’d agree to fuck you this week-end, or was it just that you thought you might rely on there being _someone_?’

‘Either way,’ said Marlow, smugly sanguine, ‘it would have been a disappointment if no one happened to have the necessities.’

‘You’ll find there’s a tube of K-Y in my kit,’ Geoff informed Iain, who was rustling through Marlow’s things, flinging out shirts and socks without bothering where they landed.

Quietly, in the way someone usually speaks when he is only half-committing to a joke that has some potential of going awry, Marlow said: ‘Were you so—o certain he’d fuck you…’

Iain, returning to bed, held his hand in front of Marlow’s face and snapped several times, as if he were trying to catch the attention of an ill-mannered puppy. He said, ‘Wheesht up. The both of ye, but yerself first; Geoff can say what he likes till it’s his turn.’

Iain had never done anything like that to Geoff, who wondered then whether it was something he did with Marlow, treat him like a dumb but pleasant creature. The thought absolutely bludgeoned Geoff with desire. He flung himself back into the mattress just as Iain told Marlow, ‘Right, strap yerself in then,’ and hooked Marlow’s left knee over his shoulder.

Geoff’s eyes were closed when Iain began to fuck Jon, but he could pinpoint the crucial moment: the mattress creaked, shifted beneath him, and Jon made a most unusual noise, a sort of dying gasp with a note of gratified surprise in it. When Geoff opened his eyes Iain and Jon were face-to-face, close enough for Iain’s fringe to brush Jon’s forehead. Iain had the expression of crosseyed, lip-licking determination that he wore when he wanted to fuck Geoff into or out of some ridiculous idea. Jon looked in ecstasy, which was to say bloody stupid; he was pink down to his shoulders and his bottom lip was pulled between his teeth, as if he were bracing against mortal pain.

Did he look like that while Iain was fucking him, Geoff wondered? He glanced down the line of Iain’s back and saw Jon curling his toes. Soon he was distracted by the sight of Iain’s arse tensing and untensing as he thrust.

Geoff had just rid himself of the shred of self-consciousness that had been preventing him touching himself when Iain slowed, pulled back, let Jon’s legs fall. Laughing, sweeping his sweat-damp fringe out of his eyes, Iain said, ‘You’re so quiet you’d think God was listening in.’

Of course Iain intended to change that: his pride would not allow anything else. When Geoff and Iain had a room of their own, in circumstances more or less secure, Iain would experiment with speed, force and position until he got a noise out of Geoff, whereupon he would go on doing that particular thing so long as it elicited noises. Geoff supposed it was the closest thing Iain had got now to getting a bandit in his sights and firing till he saw smoke. It had been only a year since the end of Iain’s war, Geoff remembered. He sometimes forgot.

He would have begun to be melancholy if Iain had not rolled Jon onto his side, lifted his thigh, entered him from behind, and gestured towards Jon’s cock in an indolent command. Iain did outrank him… Jon, facing away from Iain and towards Geoff, had not seen the gesture, so spluttered in startled indignation when Geoff slipped down the bed and took his cock in his mouth. But if there was one thing left at which he excelled, it was cocksucking; of that at least Geoff was certain. And anyway Iain was there to mutter, ‘Shut up, Jon.’

Jon got louder, but not in indignation. It had been so long since Geoff had fucked anyone but Collins, longer still since he had fucked someone of his own class, that he had forgotten how strange it was to hear an echo of one’s own voice in the throes of pleasure. Oh lord, the Englishness of it! Almost ungracious to be so English, so idiotically gentlemannish ( _not_ gentleman _ly_ ), in this cottage, in this town, in front of and in response to this man who against all better judgment Geoff lo—

‘Oh stop, stop, stop,’ Jon pleaded, patting at Geoff’s head in vain search for a lock of hair long enough to grasp. Geoff had an alarming vision of Jon pulling Iain’s hair, which was long enough. ‘I’m going to come.’

‘Is that no the bloody point?’ said Iain. He sounded out of breath, though, and thankful to withdraw, roll onto his back and recoup. Geoff did the same, setting his head back into one of the pillows, idly massaging his jaw.

‘Well, it is the aim,’ Jon began to explain, ‘but between Point A and Point B there’s— Ah.’

Iain had sprung up with a sigh, like a father burdened with begging children—or for that matter a squadron leader burdened with begging P/Os—and manhandled him into a position to be fucked again. This time Jon knelt astride Geoff’s middle, with Iain behind him. Iain reached over Geoff’s head and took a swig of whisky from the cup on the shelf, then gave Jon another round of grease and started fucking him as if he had never stopped. Geoff held Jon’s hips, keeping him in place; Iain took Jon’s cock in hand. Jon’s eyes were crushed shut, his mouth open in a perpetually-renewing shout. Iain was crying out now too, louder than he could afford to do in Gloucestershire or London, and the pure exuberance of it was a greater pleasure to Geoff even than then anticipation of being fucked himself. Yes, Geoff thought, I am glad I’m alive.

When Jon at last arched his back and finished, his eyes flung open and, with a slow confused horror that expressed itself in parallel to sublime pleasure, locked onto Geoff’s. Though Jon’s come was splattering over his chest Geoff was unconscious of anything but Jon’s widening eyes, his narrowing pupils, the overwhelming feeling of their seeing each other.

‘Oh, fuck,’ said Jon, having finished finishing. Promptly upon being released by Iain he slumped sideways onto the mattress.

Iain, still hard as anything, looked equally exhausted. His face was red and gleaming with sweat, the vein on his forehead had popped out. But when he caught Geoff’s eye he smiled, driving the familiar dimples into his cheeks. He said, ‘Am no done yet,’ and rolled Geoff onto his front and, in a state of exaltation, took him from behind. Geoff pressed his face into the pillow and let himself half-suffocate, moaning.

Was Jon looking at him? Geoff had enough wherewithal to wonder. Was he gratified that, however vulnerable he had been, Geoff was now more so? It didn’t matter; in this moment, with Iain inside of him and on top of him, panting with the effort of fucking him, Geoff was willing to burn all pride on the pyre of pleasure.

When Iain’s thrusts began to go unsteady he reached around and tugged at Geoff’s cock until, shuddering and mindless, Geoff came. Faintly he was aware of Iain’s mouth at his ear, Iain’s hot breath and breathless repetition: ‘Yes— Yes—’ Iain had barely withdrawn before he was coming also, shouting it, because he could.

There was a minute of pure nothingness: only the rising and falling of their chests as they caught their breath. They lay side-by-side, on their backs, pressed against each other to fit on the mattress. Then, after the exhilaration of fucking had faded, the hangover doubled down. Almost in unison they groaned, in pain now rather than pleasure. Geoff’s temples throbbed; his stomach turned; he became excruciatingly aware of Jon’s come still tacky on his chest, and Iain’s spread over his lower back. He wanted to bathe. Of course that meant asking Jon to light the range to heat the water.

Beside Geoff, Iain laughed, quietly and then heartily. He offered no explanation, and neither Jon nor Geoff asked. ‘Ah Christ,’ Iain muttered to himself, ‘ah fuck.’ Once the laughter had died he dragged himself out of bed in search of a cigarette.

 

* * *

 

Sunday night, the last night, they slept together in the boun-bed. Jon collapsed in it first, drunk; Collins tried to drag him out and collapsed himself, leaden with delayed exhaustion. He woke sometime in the night to Geoff, who had apparently had a go of sleeping in one of the camp beds, climbing in beside him, shoving against him so that he in turn shoved against Jon. The fungal air of the old mattress ensconced them all. Undoubtedly others would sleep in this bed. Who would wash the linen? The linen _was_ dirty; who would air it?

Not Jon: he would return to Trennels, to wait in the cottage (though he would go out to tend to his hawk, to exercise his horses, to talk to the manager about—reseeding?) until the War Office deemed it fit to release his land and his house. Not Geoff: he would return to Gloucestershire for the Glorious Twelfth, for the reassuring, unprovoking cycle of life in the part of the country he owned. Imagine, Collins thought, owning anything but what he himself did, which amounted to a few cheap pieces of furniture in his quarters at Rushton, an unwieldy stack of jazz records, and a few medals and ribbons, none of which were the VC or the DSO or the DFC or anything else that would attract real esteem. Geoff said sometimes, quietly, when he was sentimental, that Collins did own him, but he didn’t really. At least Jon had not been given the DFC either.

At breakfast they felt the cumulative effects of the long weekend bearing down on them, cramping their stomachs, needling behind their eyes. The dull brown finch on the kitchen windowsill (the window was open) appeared fuzzy and too-bright. No matter how much water Collins drank, no matter how many times he filled and refilled his cup, his throat was dry. After they had woken he had sucked Jon’s cock and Geoff had sucked his cock—one after another, not both at the same time, they were two-thirds Englishmen after all—which he was now beginning to regret, only because of the dryness in his throat. Also his nose still hurt.

He would remember this, he thought, eating the toast Jon had made for them. He would remember this when he was old; and after he and Jon and Geoff were dead nobody would remember it. Frankly that was a relief. Funny to think only a year and a few months ago there was still time for them to die in the war. Now they were on the other side of it: here there was the Common Riding, bloater paste, powdered eggs, finches calling, fistfights in muddy pastures—how did it go: ‘fresh fields—no, _woods_ , and pastures new’? He thought of old Wilkie, dinning ‘Lycidas’ into them at the Academy: _And what, pray, do _you_ think was the colour of his mantle before he ‘twitched it blue,’ Mr Collins?_ Wilkie was with his fowk in the clay at Crowdieknowe. But Collins was alive, they were all alive. Anyway he was grateful, he was contented; his wee brother had been the Common Riding Cornet. All this shite about living, and…

Having finished his toast, Geoff sat back, filled his pipe and lighted it. Jon rose to boil another kettle of water for another pot of tea, bitter and strong the way he and Geoff liked it; Collins had to fill half his cup with milk and sugar to choke it down. He thought fondly of the coffee, so creamy it was the tan of a desert uniform, that the wingco’s secretary prepared for him when he dropped in to hand over a report.

‘Oh—h,’ groaned Collins, leaning back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head and stretching, ‘when I get back to Rushton I’ve got to train up a fresh round of sprogs. The way the Staysh gets on me about it, you’d think there was still a war on.’

‘I suppose it’ll only sink in when he can buy as much bacon as he likes,’ said Jon. ‘Heaven knows when that will be.’

Geoff said, ‘Within our lifetime, one hopes.’

Collins looked back to the window and saw the finch had gone. There were only the trees, thick and bright, and beyond them the grass green with the recent rain. A car passed by on the Hawick road; Geoff tensed and relaxed. Collins’ vision blurred, then sharpened again. Quietly at first, the kettle began whistling, and for a moment Collins mistook it for birdsong.

‘Hadn’t taken you for an optimist,’ said Jon, taking the kettle off the range.

‘Oh no,’ said Geoff, ‘I did say _hopes_ , not _expects_.’

‘Whatever one says…’

Their voices were fading; Collins was going into the other room. When he looked at the bed he remembered, as if it were longer ago than it was, how it had felt to lie on it, over-warm and sweat-damp, between Jon and Geoff, watching the shadows of leaves and the morning sun on the ceiling.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> but and ben: Scottish two-roomed cottage. The but is the outer kitchen and living room, ben the inner sleeping quarters.
> 
> neuk: hearth, here containing the range
> 
> Muckle Toun: Langholm's nickname for itself (it's actually quite small)
> 
> boun-bed: a box-bed, like a four-poster with shutters rather than curtains
> 
> scunnert: shuddering with disgust
> 
> ‘Kiltartan’s poor’: from W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’
> 
> naval toasts: Forest’s Marlow family is a naval one, with Jon as an RAF exception. The Royal Navy has a mandated toast for each day of the week: the full list is [here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customs_and_traditions_of_the_Royal_Navy#Toasts)
> 
> stovies and rumbledethumps: traditional Scottish dishes; stovies is a braised meat dish, rumbledethumps approximates to bubble-and-squeak
> 
> Staysh: RAF Station Commander
> 
> ‘fowk hereaboots dinna spak the Lawlan leid nae mair’: ‘people around here don’t speak Lallans (i.e. Lowland Scots) any more.’
> 
> no wild goshawks in Britain for nearly a century: now there are, but not in the 1940s
> 
> furniture: in a falconry context, ‘tack’ for hawks, hoods, jesses etc.
> 
> glaikit: foolish, stupid
> 
> couthy: cosy, respectable
> 
> dout: suspect
> 
> ‘changed, changed utterly, a tumty something—how did it go, and was it the same one that had the falcon raking away?’: Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, but the one with the falcon raking away is ‘The Second Coming’.
> 
> greetin: crying or wailing


End file.
